Body region indication systems are used to aid in diagnosis and treatment of patients by quantifying a patient's experience to a physician or a clinician. In particular, body region indication systems allow a user, such as a patient, nurse, clinician, or physician, to indicate points or regions of interest on the human body according to a uniform, standardized template. The indicated points or regions may include locations of injury, pain, treatment, discoloration, paresthesia, or the like.
Conventional body region indication systems have typically been based on two-dimensional drawing methods, e.g., allowing a user to draw on a printed outline or template of the human body. For example, a user may be presented with a blank body outline on a printout or a computer screen, and asked to circle or shade any affected areas. Such static, two-dimensional template systems are limited in that some areas of the body surface are not visible to the user. Hence the user must approximate the indication regions in invisible or partially visible areas by coloring near the edges of the template outlines. The approximations give inaccurate body indication results with respect to both the position and extent of the regions.
Some existing body region indication systems display both a front and back outline of the body. However, additional, mutually exclusive views always leave some areas of the body, e.g., the sides, difficult to indicate accurately because they are located at the edges of the body views. Further, users of such front and back body outline systems have difficulty associating the orientation of the patient with the orientation of the displayed templates. For example, leg pain may be indicated properly on the front outline of the body as the front of the left leg, but indicated incorrectly on the back outline of the body as the back of the right leg. The error is difficult to determine after entry, since the inaccurate indications may be medically reasonable.
Multiple, overlapping views could be used in an attempt to avoid the problems associated with having areas of the body not shown. Such templates, however, would require the user to either redundantly fill in the affected regions in all views consistently, or choose from many possible ways to indicate the same body region. Many of the problems associated with the existing body region indication systems arise from the static nature of the outline templates.